Minting, Apeing, Diamond Hands, & FUD – What Does it All Mean?
If you are new to the crypto & NFT space you may be wondering why it sounds like people are speaking a different language. Well, they kind of are. We thought we would cover some of the most common terms you may be hearing or seeing online when researching projects & familiarizing yourselves with NFTs.
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WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Diamond hands
‘Diamond hands’ is one of the most popular slang terms in the world of crypto and NFTs. It’s become its own meme, its own emoji, and even the theme of whole NFT projects. A person with diamond hands is a person who holds on to an asset through price volatility, negative news, poor market sentiment, and whatever kind of FUD (another abbreviation we’ll cover below) you’ll encounter in this space.
Diamond hands can also be used as a verb: “She diamond-handed bitcoin through the 2018 bear market.”
PFP project
Proof of Picture or Profile Picture: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin
Burn
To burn an NFT essentially means to destroy it. If only 5,000 NFTs are sold in a collection that was intended to consist of 10,000, for instance, the team may decide to ‘burn’ the remaining 5,000. Other projects let owners ‘burn’ two NFTs to receive a new potentially rare NFT.
Airdrop
When you receive an ‘airdrop’, you automatically get a certain amount of a specific cryptocurrency or a new NFT dropped into your wallet for free. It’s long been a common practice in the general crypto space but has also become a popular way for NFT projects to reward their early adopters with new artworks, for instance.
DAO
DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. When you own an NFT from a project like Head DAO, you and all the other owners have voting rights and control over the future actions and overall direction of the project. Many NFT projects are setting up similar structures to become more community-driven and secure ongoing support.
Floor
The ‘floor’ or ‘floor price’ of a project is simply the lowest price at which you can buy an NFT from that project on the secondary market. It’s the most popular metric for tracking
FUD
‘FUD’ stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The term is used in crypto and NFTs alike to describe negative news stories, tweets, Discord messages, etc., that are either inaccurate or completely false. You’ll often see people point to FUD as the reason behind large price drops in cryptocurrencies or NFTs.
Gas
The price for making a transaction on a blockchain is called ‘gas’. When buying NFTs on a blockchain like Solana, gas is negligible. On Ethereum, however, a $50 gas fee is about the lowest you can hope for, and it all depends on the activity on the network. Low activity, low fees. High activity, high fees. Which leads me to the next term you need to know…
Gas war
Oh, the dreaded gas wars! These are a common occurrence on Ethereum and somewhat of a rite of passage for newcomers. When a popular NFT collection launches, with 100,000 people fighting for 10,000 NFTs, you need to increase your gas fee and outbid the others’ for your transaction to go through. This is what’s known as a gas wars.
Generative art
Generative art deserves a lot more attention than I’m able to give it here and there’s plenty of good material available on the topic. It’s arguably one of the key innovations in the world of digital art and collectibles in recent years, used to create all the major collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club, Cool Cats, Sup Ducks, Pudgy Penguins, etc.
In short, all the NFTs in each of these collections have certain traits in common: Clothes, skin or fur color, eye type, headwear, background color, etc. With 20 different types of clothes, 20 different eye types, 20 different background colors, etc., it’s possible to mix and match these traits to create a collection of 10,000 NFTs that are all unique. While the initial traits are hand-made, each NFT is automatically created by a computer with a random combination of all the available traits. This is the part of the process that’s described as ‘generative’.
Minting
When you’re buying a completely new NFT from the creator, you’re ‘minting’ it. It’s basically the process of creating that NFT on the blockchain.
MM
MM is shorthand for MetaMask, the most popular NFT wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem.
OS
OS is shorthand for OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace on Ethereum.
Paper hands
‘Paper hands’ is basically the opposite of ‘diamond hands’ and is another term that isn’t NFT-specific but often used in the space. It refers to someone who sells something, e.g., an NFT or a cryptocurrency, at what is perceived by others as too low of a price.
Just like ‘diamond handing’, ‘paper hands’ can also be used as a verb: “Someone just paper-handed a Cool Cat for 6 ETH!”
Reveal
The word here is pretty self-explanatory, but its meaning in an NFT context may not be. For new generative projects, the artwork won’t actually be created until the NFT is minted, and you won’t know exactly what you get until after you buy it. In other words, the art only reveals itself after it’s purchased. It’s up to the creators behind the collection whether the reveal happens immediately, when the collection sells out, or with a delay of 24 or 48 hours for instance.
Here's an example from Crypto Tech Women
Rug-pull
A ‘rug-pull’ is something I hope you’ll never experience! It’s essentially a scam where the people behind a seemingly legit project disappear with all the money immediately after launch. You might get an actual NFT in return for what you paid, but it’s most likely worthless and not even tradeable on a secondary marketplace.
Rugpull is often used as a verb as well, as in “I got rug-pulled” or simply “I got rugged”. You’ll also see some people on Discord simply writing ‘rug’, often to spread FUD in the
(Floor) Sweep
‘Sweeping’ is another commonly uttered term because of people’s interest in a project’s ‘floor’. To ‘sweep the floor’ means to buy up a large number of the cheapest NFTs in a collection on the secondary market. Teams sometimes do this or are asked by the community to do this, for their own projects. Other times it may be done by a single individual, referred to as a ‘whale’.
Utility
There are many ways a project can provide utility & there are new ways coming out all the time. Currently, it provides access to a specific community
Whale
A ‘whale’ is basically someone with a lot of money, either available to invest or already invested in a high-value NFT project. Thus, someone with 1,000 ETH in their account would be considered a whale, just like someone with 200 Bored Apes would. Whales are important because of their power to move markets, either upward by buying a lot from a given collection or downward by selling.
Bonus: Abbreviations and Intentional Misspellings
Here are some fun(ny) terms to help you not seem like a total newb on Discord or Twitter.
- Ded. Simply a misspelling of ‘dead’, for instance, used to refer to a project that was rug-pulled.
- GM. GM is simply short for ‘good morning’ and you’ll see it flooding Twitter and Discord at all times of day because we’re a global — and kind! — community.
- GN. GN means ‘good night’, feel free to use that as well.
- GL. Good Luck.
- GMI. Another very popular abbreviation is GMI, and its offsprings WAGMI and NGMI. GMI means ‘Going to make it’, as in “If you buy and hold on to this awesome NFT, you’re gonna become rich and have a great life!” (more or less). WAGMI, naturally, means ‘We’re all going to make it’. NGMI on the other hand means ‘Not going to make it’. Use these terms as frequently as possible to be perceived as a true NFT insider.
- Hodl. ‘Hodl’ is really an OG crypto term, a misspelling of ‘hold’ first used by Bitcoin forum member GameKyuubi when they declared “I AM HODLING” in 2013 after a ~40% drop in bitcoin’s price. The term is used by crypto people to say that they’re holding on to their assets through thick and thin, not unlike the diamond-handing we covered earlier. ‘HODL’ has later been assigned the acronym ‘Hold On for Dear Life’ to make it seem less stupid, Either way – we are HODL'ing!
- LFG. ‘LFG’ means ‘Let’s fucking go!’. Pretty self-explanatory. It’s used in excitement about new project launches, big NFT news, etc.
- Moon. Another general financial market term that’s often used in the NFT space, ‘going to the moon’ or ‘mooning’ refers to an asset’s value increasing by a lot. There’s no clear definition, but a 10% increase certainly won’t cut it for crypto people who saw bitcoin go from $1 to $60k.
- Ser. ‘Ser’ means ‘sir’ but is usually used ironically. In other words, if someone uses ‘ser’ in a sentence, don’t take the message too seriously.
- Wen. Get your pens out, this one’s tricky! JK, JK. ‘Wen’ means ‘when’. That’s it. It’s just another silly misspelling used ironically by NFT and crypto people, often in “Wen moon?” which loosely translates to “When will the price of this asset increase exponentially?”
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